7 GIMP Selection Tricks Every Beginner Should Know

hello and welcome back to another video my name is mike davies and in today's tutorial i'll be showing you seven essential tricks that i think every beginner should know i'll be using version 2.10.24 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial before i get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com i have tons of free software tutorials on here as well as help articles so definitely check that out you can get more by becoming a dmd premium member and you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and i'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video i'll be using a couple of free photos for today's tutorial including this one i just went with the large size download for this just click free download and i also went with this free photo here so once again click the drop down and i will with the large size to demonstrate these seven essential selection tricks i'll be creating this composition here all right so let's dive right in here the first selection trick is going to be copying selections from one composition to another this is not quite as intuitive as you would think it is inside a but let's start off over here with the original image i did create an outline of the main subject ahead of time here and i did that using the foreground select tool which you can access here inside of the third tool group here it is under foreground select i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to this tool including how to use it so i'm not going to go through the entire process of outlining my subject but i did save the selection area that i created from the foreground select tool as a channel so over here in my channels tab here we have our selection all i have to do is come over here and click to convert this channel back to a selection so this was the final selection i ended up with after using my foreground select tool so let's come back over here to the layers panel so when it comes to copying and pasting selections inside of and i'm not talking about the pixels inside the selection area i'm just talking about the border here so these marching ants so when we want to copy selections we're going to come over here and toggle the quick mask so there you'll see the quick mask is going to give us the area that is included inside of the selection area i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to the quick mask tool if you want to see all of the uses for this or pretty much the main use for this and then we're going to come over here to the composition we want to paste our selection to so in this case i'm just going to use this stock photo as our example and once again you're going to toggle on the quick mask using the little icon here or the shortcut key shift q and then you're going to hit ctrl v that's going to paste your selection area here to the quick mask but right now this is way too big so what we're going to do is use any of our transform tools and that's going to allow us to transform this in any way i'm gonna go with the scale tool for this example so shift s on the keyboard is the shortcut key for the scale tool you can also come over here to the transformations group here inside the toolbox and just go with scale so click and hold your mouse on this tool group and release it on scale and you're going to want to make sure your transform mode is set to layer and then you're going to come over here to your selection and just drag this in and if i hold ctrl it'll scale it into the center and if i hold the shift key it'll maintain the original aspect ratio of the selection area and right there we are pretty much back to the original size relative to the stock photo we're using here as the background photo so once i'm ready i'll come over here and hit scale and we can perform any other transformations to this but when i'm ready to bring this into the composition as a selection area all you have to do is click the icon to toggle the quick mask off and there you can see now our selection area has been pasted into our new composition so the next trick when it comes to selections is that you can create a selection area from any pixels on a layer so to demonstrate this i'm going to get started on the composition i showed you guys here at the beginning of this tutorial so i'll hit ctrl n on my keyboard that's going to bring up the create a new image dialog box and i just typed 1080 by 1920 using the tab key to go between the numerical fields here and i'll click ok and let's come back over here to the original image and i'm going to toggle the quick mask off so we're back to the selection that was created using the foreground select tool and i'll come over here to my layers panel and make sure that my main layer is active here once the layer is active i'll hit ctrl c that's going to allow us to copy the pixels inside of the selection area and then we'll come over here to our new composition control v to paste so now we've pasted those pixels from our photo into our new composition and i still have these skill tools selected if you guys don't just come back here to this tool group and choose the scale tool and i'm just going to click on here and i'm going to hold control and shift while i drag my mouse to scale this down and i'll hit scale so right now the selection's a bit sloppy i'm going to clean that up in a second let's come over here to the floating selection and we're just going to click the create a new layer icon that's going to put this on its own new layer so as i mentioned this trick is that we want to create a selection around the pixels in a layer which in this case is going to be our model to do that all we need to do is alt click on the layer and there you can see now we have the model here in the photo outlined let me hit ctrl shift a if that didn't work for you you can go to layer transparency alpha 2 selection and that's going to create a selection area around our model this trick is going to work on text as well it doesn't have to just be a photo just to demonstrate let me come back over here so this was the final composition i created here you'll see a layer of text if i come over here alt click on that layer there you'll see we now have a selection area created from the text so i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that let's come back over here to the composition we're working on so real quick i'm just going to show you how to clean up the pixels here the reason this is looking messy is that these areas outside of the selection area are actually partially selected i do cover this in my selection area basics and selection area advanced tutorials so definitely check that out for more information regarding why this is happening but the way i can get rid of that is just by coming over here to my paths tab and i'm just going to convert the selection here to a path and i can do that using this icon here selection to path and so there you'll see our selection is now a path i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and now when i convert this path back to a selection by using this icon here which is path to selection and now come over here to select invert and finally hit the delete key that's going to get rid of all those excess pixels so let me just invert that back let's come over here to select invert again so one of the cool things here is that i can take this technique we've just used the alpha to transparency technique and i can now fill in the selection area using something like a gradient so let's come back here to the layers panel and come over here and click to create a new layer and i do want to name this model gradient so i'll keep that there and we'll keep the fill with set to transparency and click ok so now i'll hit the g key on my keyboard or grab the gradient tool here from the toolbox and i can change the gradient inside of here to whatever colors i want to do that i'm going to set my foreground and background colors so if i click on here you'll see the light blue color i'm using is going to be using this html notation you guys can type that same thing here to copy my color and i'll come over here and you'll see this is the html notation for my background color which is like a purple color so i'll click ok and let me come over here to the gradient itself i'm going to change this to foreground and background and you can go either hsv or rgb let's go hsv here and the shape is set to linear so now i'm going to click and drag this and i can always come over here and just swap the gradient out and once we're ready hit the enter key and if it just swaps the colors like that again hit the enter key one more time and just grab another tool that will apply that gradient so i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and i'm going to come over here and make sure i have my move tool selected so you can use the m key on your keyboard and i'm just going to move this slightly to the right there and release and come over here to the layers panel drag that down below and there you can see one application of that feature all right so the third selection trick for is that you can convert any active selection inside of your composition to a border so some of you may know about the border feature let me come over here to the background layer if i were to hit ctrl a on my keyboard it would select the entire composition and i can then create a border around my document here by going to select border and i can set the border size so let's go at 25 pixels border style set to smooth and click ok so many of you are probably aware of that trick there however this doesn't just work on borders around your entire composition so let me hit ctrl shift a to deselect that that's the same as going to select none so now i'm going to come over here to the original layer which right now it's called pasted layer let me double click on this and just rename this model hit the enter key so once again i'm going to alt click on here one thing you guys might remember is that some of these areas are partially selected so i want to get rid of those partially selected areas and i can do that easily by going to select sharpen so that's going to convert the edge here to a sharp edge as opposed to having partially selected areas which is caused by a feathered edge once we've done that let's come over here to select border and we're gonna go with the 5 pixel border here and click ok so there you'll see the outline around our model now is a border and i can now fill this border in with any color so let's come up top here to the model layer let's click to create a new layer and i'm just going to name this model border hit the enter key and let's come over here and i'm just going to click on the foreground color and go with this color here so use that html notation if you'd like and now i'll click and drag this color inside the border ctrl shift a to deselect that and now we have a border around our model the next selection trick in is that you can use transform tools on selection areas so this is super useful for a variety of reasons maybe you want to rotate a selection area you drew or maybe you want to scale it up or down etc so let me give you guys an example here let me come over to the second tool group and go with the ellipse select tool i'll release my mouse and i'm just going to click and drag to draw a random ellipse shape so we have this here on our composition and now let's say we want to rotate this we can't use the existing handles that are on here right now however i can hit shift r on my keyboard which will grab the rotate tool and now you'll see here under the rotate tool options we have the transform option and i can change this to selection and now i can click and drag my mouse and rotate this you can also manually type in a value or use the bar here and i'll come over here and click rotate so now as you can see i've rotated this selection area and let me just fill this in so i'll come over here to the background layer click to create a new layer and i'll name this ellipse pattern hit the enter key and shift b on the keyboard will bring up the bucket fill tool here and i'll make sure the fill type for me is set to pattern fill i'm using dot pattern 29 which is actually a dot pattern from my patterns pack this is available to my dmd premium members so definitely check that out if you're interested in downloading this dot pattern pack and now using my bucket fill tool i'll click to fill this in and i'll hit ctrl shift a that will deselect that so now we have a cool pattern behind here the next selection trick is that you can actually use selections as frames inside a this is super easy so let's say we wanted to bring in a photo but we wanted that photo to have a sort of geometric frame all i have to do is use any of selection tools to create a selection area so in this case let's go with the free select tool here you can see the shortcut key for that is f and now i'm going to draw the shape i want for my frame so i'm just going to click to create nodes here using this tool and make sure i close this out and i'll hit the enter key to apply that so here we have our selection area i'm going to bring a photo in to fill this selection area in as if this were a frame the first thing i want to do though is i want to create a new layer that the photo is going to be on so let's come back here to the background layer and create a new layer and i'm just going to name this photo frame hit the enter key so now let's come back over to this image here and i have the selection area here from the earlier part of this tutorial i'll hit ctrl shift a to get rid of that or go to select none so i'll hit ctrl c to copy this and let's come back over here to our composition now if i want to use this selection area as a frame i can go to edit paste into selection so now we've pasted this photo here you'll see the main issue is that this is not gonna fit inside the frame one downside to this is that does not allow you to scale your image up or down once you have pasted it here you actually have to do that ahead of time as of right now so let me hit ctrl z i'm not going to scale the image up or down but i am going to rotate it so i'll come back to this image and we'll go to image transform and then rotate 90 degrees clockwise and now i'll hit ctrl c again and come back over here edit paste into selection and by the way if control c doesn't work you can just go to edit copy there but i'll come over here to paste into selection and although you cannot scale this you can move this so let's come over here and grab the move tool so i can move this into place if i want to change the positioning of it and then once i'm ready i'm going to come over here to the floating selection that is created and i'm going to anchor this to the layer below so i'll just click the little anchor icon and that basically merges that with the photo frame layer below and now we have our photo here inside of the selection frame so hit ctrl shift a to deselect that alright so that's super simple the next selection trick found inside a is that you can convert your selection areas to guides this can be super useful whenever you are trying to align certain objects to the selection area so for example in this case we're going to align some text to the original selection area we created here or the selection area of the model so let's come back here to the original model layer let's say we wanted to align text to this model i'll come over here alt click on here that's going to create our selection area and again some of these areas are partially selected so to prevent creating guides in the wrong location i'm just going to go to select sharpen so once i've done that now i'll come over here to image guides new guides from selection so there you can see now we have guys created along that selection and i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that now let's come over here grab the text tool and i have this set to monsterat bold that's a free font i downloaded i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to downloading and installing fonts for i have both a windows and a mac version so definitely check that out but now with my text tool i'm just going to click on my composition and with the caps lock key on i'm just going to type is free and i do want to scale this text up a bit so i'll hit ctrl a to select all the text and i'll come over here to this little text box let's go with 100 for that let's come over here to the toolbox and grab the rotate tool we're going to change the mode of this back to the original layer mode since we changed it to selection earlier and i'm just going to rotate this while holding the control and shift key and hit rotate and now i'm going to grab the move tool from the toolbox making sure i'm hovered over the pixels in the text i can move this over and now you can see we can align this to that guide we created so we can snap it to the guide like so or if we want the actual text aligned with this guide and not just the text box we can click once on the text there and use the arrow keys on the keyboard and have those align all right so the seventh and final selection trick found inside a is that you can actually use your selection areas as a crop tool obviously this has a variety of uses but it just means that you can crop your images to whatever selection areas you want so for example let's say we wanted to crop this image so that it perfectly fit the size of the model here what i can do is alt click on that model layer and let's just click on this layer to make it our active layer and again there are partially selected areas here so let's just go to select sharpen to make sure that those are taken care of and now to crop to the selection i'll go to image crop to selection and that will crop everything down to our selection area i'm going to hit control z though to back up because i don't want that change to be permanent there i want to undo that change and i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that so that's pretty much it for these selection area tips but i am going to apply the finishing touches to this so that it looks the way it looked originally and mostly what i did was i just added some layer modes to all these layers so let's come up here to the model border layer and we're going to change this to divide come over here to photo frame and we're going to change this layer mode and let's also come up to the model gradient layer and finally let's come down here to the background layer and i'm just going to change the color here so let's go with this light blue click ok hit the g key to grab the gradient tool and we'll change this we'll go foreground and background with the hard edge there with the shape set to linear let's now click and drag to draw this and let's just swap the colors and i'll hit the enter key to apply that and finally i'll go to image guides remove all guides and there's our final composition all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did don't forget to like the video subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 11,306

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2021, GIMP 2.10.24, selection areas, copy and paste selection, selection to path, alpha to transparency, add border to image, transform selections, create frame, selection to guides, crop

Id: GmIiwdy0H2U

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021